'This Is the Only Way That Pipelines Will Be Stopped'

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Things were not as usual on Wednesday afternoon in John Marshall Park, a semi-shady oasis next to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Dead in front of the building, five Native American drummers pounded and chanted and chanted and pounded. The crowd around them, some in Native dress and some in T-shirts and jeans, and some in the biker leather of a Native motorcycle club from upstate New York, joined in. This was the language of the prairie and the hills come to the capital of the land of politics and the law.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Inside the courthouse, in Courtroom Number 19, where there were no seats to be had, District Judge James Boasberg was conducting a hearing in the matter of The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Corps of Engineers. At issue was an injunction which would delay the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline through the tribe's land. Ever since April, members of the Standing Rock nation in North Dakota have been demonstrating and blocking the construction of the pipeline, arguing that it is profaning lands that the tribe considers to be sacred. The pipeline is meant to carry Bakken oil from North Dakota through Iowa to Illinois.

Most Popular

Charles P. Pierce

The confrontations between the protesters and the people who are building the pipeline have grown increasingly touchy. Governor Jack Dalrymple, in charge of one of the continent's few petro-states, has declared the demonstrations to be a threat to the public order and has declared a state of emergency along the pipeline route. Electric power to the protest camp, as well as its water supply, have been cut off. In front of the courthouse on Wednesday, people who had come to Washington from North Dakota expressed concerns for their people back home, because nobody was quite sure what steps Dalrymple might take to enforce the state of emergency he declared.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There seems little question that the Dakota Access pipeline has replaced the defunct Keystone XL pipeline as ground zero for the multi-faceted battle over pipelines and, therefore, over energy policy going forward. After the president canceled Keystone, it seemed that a little of the air went out of the anti-pipeline forces. Major environmental groups moved on to other issues. However, on the ground in places like Iowa and the Dakotas, local grassroots activists looked at the campaign against Keystone and drew their own lessons from it. Purely through the dint of the efforts of local ranchers and Native tribes along the proposed route, the Dakota Access pipeline is the new Keystone XL.

"Some of the environmental groups decided to focus their attention elsewhere, and after six years, I can understand that," said Jane Fleming Kleeb, the chairman of the Nebraska Democratic party who made her bones leading the fight against the Keystone project in that state. "What should have happened after Keystone got rejected was a huge influx of resources to local and state groups fighting pipelines, and that hasn't happened. What has happened is landowners and tribes on the ground are fighting with everything they have and there have been 20-plus projects that have been cancelled."

Beyond the environmental questions regarding more pipelines carrying more carbon-based fuels to more places, Kleeb's key issue has been the shadowy use of the eminent domain power of the several states at the behest of private companies like TransCanada, the extraction behemoth behind the Keystone project and, in this case, Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build the Dakota Access pipeline. Politically, it's a very shrewd idea; both liberals and conservatives have railed against the use of eminent domain ever since the Supreme Court's Kelo decision. You may recall that it briefly was an issue in the Republican primary debates. Jeb (!) Bush, in particular, hammered Donald Trump hard on Trump's own use of eminent domain in his various casino enterprises.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

In fact, very much like what happened in Nebraska, the resistance in Iowa against the Dakota Access pipeline is led by ranchers furious at what they see as the state's complicity in a private land-grab. Earlier this week, a judge denied a stay on construction of the pipeline, kicking the decision over to the Iowa utility board. The plaintiffs in that case accused Energy Partners of blackjacking them into granting easements by threatening to have their land condemned, a charge that the company's lawyers denied, but one that is more than familiar to the people in Nebraska who fought TransCanada. "This has been the slow erosion of property rights," said Kleeb. "This is the only way that pipelines will be stopped. Construction companies will find ways to get around permits and other obstacles. That has to be brought through the courts."

Most Popular

This was the language of the prairie and the hills come to the capital of the land of politics and the law.

There are other problems as well. On Wednesday, The Des Moines Register ran a story in which farmers who were paid to allow an easement through their property along the pipeline's route in Iowa complained that the pipeline company had reneged on promises to restore the land once the pipeline got buried.

Instead, he's got a scar running across his soybean fields where the dark, fertile topsoil is being stacked on top of several feet of hard clay mixed with clay loam. The result, Goebel fears, will be soil less suited for growing crops—and much less valuable. "Nature separated those soils for a reason, that's the way I feel," said Goebel, who runs a 164-acre century farm in Sioux County. "If nature put it there, they should put it back the way it was." His complaint is one of several popping up across Iowa as work ramps up on the pipeline that will stretch from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota across Iowa to Patoka, IIl.

(Perhaps the most interesting speculation centers on the fact that, three weeks ago, Energy Partners sold its stake in the Bakken pipeline system to everybody's favorite disaster farm, Enbridge Energy Partners of Houston. A few cynical souls have noticed that this combination might allow not only the transport of Bakken crude to Illinois, but also, in conjunction with the existing TransCanada Upland pipeline, the development of a system that could reach the tar-sands moonscape of Alberta, giving us Keystone by another means.)

The hearing was long and polite, touching on the threat to delicate archaeological sites along the Standing Rock portion of the route and on whether or not the pipeline company had done due diligence as to its commitments and responsibilities to the Native people of the region. Judge Boasberg promised that he would render a decision on the injunction within two weeks.

Getty

Outside the courtroom, Bobbie Jean Threelegs, a member of the Standing Rock nation, spoke about how she had come to be involved in the resistance among her people. She is one of a group of runners who have run the length of the proposed pipeline in relays from South Dakota to Omaha in order to deliver a petition to officials of the Army Corps of Engineers, who did not accept them. Bobbie Jean and her fellow runners then organized a massive relay that brought them to Washington to sit in on the hearing.

"It took us 28 days," she said. "I got involved in the cause by my relative. She came back to the reservation, to each district meeting, informing people about the Dakota Access pipeline. I was involved with the youth then. This is an important issue for the youth because it will affect future generations."

They ran for 28 days in order to sit in witness at a two-hour court proceeding. Outside, the drumming and chanting went on and on, even after the lawyers all had gone home—the voice of the prairie and the hills come to the land of politics and the law, which has been so often deaf to it.